The Bush administration never managed to shake the specious implication that military tribunals represented some unprecedented Bushian invention designed to evade justice, rather than longstanding historical practice.\u00a0\u00a0 I don\u2019t understand why it failed so miserably on that count.\u00a0 Yet the former administration itself anticipated the incoherent Obama-Holder policy of terror forum-shopping by trying Moussaoui in civilian court, while directing other terror suspects towards military courts.\u00a0<\/p>\n
As much as I don\u2019t object to the use of military tribunals during war, especially where there is risk of compromising intelligence, the underlying conceit here that (Islamic) terrorism is unambiguously war is more problematic than I once conceded.\u00a0\u00a0 The potentially indefinite duration of the alleged war against us, the absence of any indicia for knowing when it is over, and even the highly sporadic nature of the attacks, are just a few of the features that make the assumption that America is on a conventional war footing troublesome.\u00a0 It\u2019s a clich\u00e9 to say that we need a \u201cnational conversation\u201d about how to conceptualize terrorism and our response to it, and I suppose that the Bush administration de facto did decide\u2014with intermittent Congressional backing–that we were \u201cat war\u201d with terrorism.\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 Still, I would like to see a more explicit debate about what that means.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
The Bush administration never managed to shake the specious implication that military tribunals represented some unprecedented Bushian invention designed to evade justice, rather than longstanding historical practice.\u00a0\u00a0 I don\u2019t understand why it failed so miserably on that count.\u00a0 Yet the … Continue reading